The Christian Homemaking Podcast: Simply Convivial with Mystie Winckler

The problem with much of the productivity and planning advice out there is that it begins with a vision for a 5-year outcome. When we as mothers at home try to do that, we are rather at a loss. We might not even know how many children we’ll have in 5 years. If your oldest is 5, you’re not likely to accurately foresee what it’s like to have a 10 year old – and the same is true if your oldest is 10...

What adjectives do you associate with repetition? Dullness, boredom, monotony. What about training, practice, discipline, rehearsal. Pianists practice the same scales and pieces over and over daily. Actors rehearse their scenes over and over. Athletes practice the same drills over and over daily. "Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we...

I’m a proponent of making short-term plans and goals – ones that can be tracked and kept top-of-mind easily. I call it ‘interval planning’ because I think it’s like interval training: Go all out for a short amount of time, then take a rest period, and you’ll progress more than if you just slog through at a consistent but slower rate.

So, I discovered that otium was the Latin word for leisure, and although I have not encountered it in education talks, it seems to have been the word used by philosophers to mean precisely what Pieper in Leisure, the Basis of Culture was trying to convey: that to truly cultivate arts – including those of reading, thinking, and discussing – we must have a space apart from the cares of marketing, bu...

Leverage the interval training technique in your personal life by setting up your calendar in intervals and planning goals accordingly. Planning and executing in short-term bursts is a great way to keep laser focus and high energy. By always keeping short deadlines and tackling manageable chunks, you can avoid overwhelm and procrastination.

Would we rather look good than be good, than do what is right? What if we prioritized being and doing good over looking good? And I’m not talking about makeup. It is simpler and more immediately rewarding to have people think we are good than to expend the effort and rise to the challenge of really pursuing virtue, regardless of people’s opinion of us.

Breaking up your year into intervals is a simple way to sharpen your focus and stay engaged with projects and the things that need to be done to keep life at home rolling along. Instead of looking ahead over an entire year and making goals, try looking only at the next six weeks. What has to happen in the next six weeks? That’s a lot more clear usually.

Welcome to The Simplified Organization Audio Blog! Releasing weekly on Mondays, this podcast gives you short and punchy action items and mindset resets. Check out the podcast page here and please leave a review. Thanks! Season 1: Interval Planning Make interval plans work for you. Use the theory behind interval training to maximize your planning effectiveness. Just as runners train and gain streng...

Education is For Life This motto keyed into a vague notion I’ve been pondering lately: The idea of focusing more on the process, on doing what I should do, and leaving the results, the outcome, to God. The world recommends setting SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, timely) goals, where the focus is on achieving measurable results. But, doesn’t the Bible focus more on obedience and...

Faithfulness doesn’t imply large, impressive deeds. Faithfulness is all about doing what’s in front of you – your own duty, however humble that is – reliably and earnestly. Faithfulness does not evaluate how a duty ranks in the public eye or whether or not the duty will earn credit; faithfulness steadily fulfills its calling.

Often when we plan out our goals, we think in year-long chunks of time, either personal goals in January or academic goals in August. If you’ve ever done this, perhaps you’ve noticed that it’s really difficult to keep those goals.  But now I’ve found an way to avoid this cycle, to keep motivated, and to have goals while remaining flexible.

Often when we plan out our goals, we think in year-long chunks of time, either personal goals in January or academic goals in August. If you’ve ever done this, perhaps you’ve noticed that it’s really difficult to keep those goals. A cycle I’m familiar with goes like this: Commit to a huge life-overhaul, personal transformation sort of goal for the year. Go for it gung-ho for two or three weeks in...

Festina Lente, or Faithfulness part of the Education Is for Life series This series was inspired by Chrisopher Perrin’s great webinars on the principles of classical education. One of my favorites so far was his “deep dive” into the principle Festina Lente. Erasmus wrote of this proverb in his Adagia: If you weigh carefully the force and the sentiment of our proverb, its succinct brevity, how fert...